Magic and Realism at MOAH

Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture and Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, now at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History through April 13th is a wide ranging exhibition presented in partnership with Local Access and LACMA as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program. The compelling exhibition features the works of Naida Osline, uncovering the plant world with Botany of Transcendence; Andrew K. Thompson, with A Sky Full of Holes; Ellen Friedlander, with the exquisite portraiture of her exhibition The Soul Speaks; Brad Miller, with his shimmering Water Shadows; and Osceola Refetoff, with his dynamic Magic and Realism. Each artist has a different approach, but all of the works comprise a potent mix of the experimental and the traditional. Full coverage of the full exhibition is upcoming.

Turn Signals

Osceola Refetoff’s Magic and Realism, presented on the museum’s mezzanine gallery, features the artist’s stunning use of both infrared and pinhole photography. Dreamy and surreal – while also staying firmly in tune with a sense of place,  Refetoff deals with subjects as diverse as climate change and the lure of the open road, covering a wide range of physical territory from Anarctica and Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, to Palm Springs, LA, and the Mojave Desert.

Owners and Guests (Pink/Blue)  -
Multispectral exposures combine infrared and visual spectrum light using filters in front to the lens to control the wavelengths recorded.

There are hot pink palms and lawns in a brilliantly alien world of an altered Palm Springs, above, while in the artist’s “Proteus Rising,” below, a soft focus icy blue creates a poignant look at the changing climate in Antarctica.

Proteus Rising 


Chandelier on La Cienega Boulevard  

The diffused light of a chandelier is a perfect metaphor for Los Angeles in all its glamor and the grief of broken dreams. In  “Moon Under Virgo Bay,”  taken in Danskoya, Svalbard, a blue orb of sea, populated by a small ship, forms a reverse planet. Intense blue water beneath snow and ice swirls around a darker ink blot of deeper water – like a black hole beyond the Milky Way, ready to consume the known-world from the center out.

Moon Under Virgo Bay – captured during The Arctic Circle artist residency aboard the tall ship Antigua 

Throughout Magic and Realism, in the many different series that the exhibit pulls from, Refetoff’s meticulous technique includes modified digital cameras, analog filters, and pinhole devices. But, his perfection of technique takes a back seat to the lustrous colors and compelling pull of his subjects. With a background in filmmaking, Refetoff brings to the photographic art world a keen sense of visual dynamics, a stroke of noir, a hint of the Fellini-esque, and a bold design asethetic that lifts the most common of vistas into a higher realm.

Mirror Truck

Through his lens, we observe the mirrored sheen of a truck on an empty highway; a spin of white clouds down a long, linear, vanishing point of a road; a whirring section of an amusement park ride; and a row of mustard yellow golden palms.

Rock-O-Plane



These are among the many startling, significant images on display.Two of Refetoff’s artworks that already have a home in MOAH’s permanent collection, the pinhole exposure of “Blue Hopper,” shot in the Mojave, and the LA-set “Day Tripping” are also a part of the wide-ranging exhibition.

Duplexity  (from the series Chromatopia)

More of the MOAH exhibition ahead. Keep one eye turned to your cameras, and the other to this site.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist

 

 

 

Gay Summer Rick Illuminates Los Angeles – Osceola Refetoff Elegaically Depicts Climate Change

Bergamot Station in Santa Monica is presently hosting two incredible exhibitions – both on exhibit until early November.

At bG Gallery, Gay Summer Rick’s glorious color palette and precise oil painting using palette knife morphs the impressionistic form with a gauzy realism of seascape and landscape. Lighter Than Air, her latest series of richly rewarding works, glow with Southern California light. The transcendence that light creates is the force within her work, which here touches on the lyrical and metaphysical as well as the contours of the coast. “Somewhere Above” is a burst of golden sky reflecting on cloud or water, Heaven as a visual portal, perhaps. “Buoyant” gives us a woman floating on a yellow inner tube against a sun-kissed sea, an almost child-like bliss. “Cadence” offers a pale periwinkle sea suffused with bits of pink light, the pink line of the horizon or a distant shore all a-glow.

“The Golden Sun” is just that, with a small figure bobbing on a surfboard, watching a bold pink sky slowly fade. “Fly” is also a pink and gold gem, as an airplane comes into a pink LA surrounded by palms; while “Good” is a view of homecoming as seen from a plane, the grand grid of lights below an airplane window spread out against a fine canopy of Cerulean blue. “Distant Light” is a shimmery, mirage like view of distant houses, illuminated against a shoreline.

Taking a direction new to this viewer, Rick offers a series of trapeze artists, in her series “The Fliers #1-#4.” Here pale, almost abstract figures outlined in a gold/pale mustard shade reach for, connect, or glide past each other on aerial rigging. There is the quality of a dream about this work – but all her work here is dreamy – disconnected from a known reality, it suggests our ability to tenaciously, with assistance, take to the sky the artist so admires.

And speaking of sky, in “Lustre” it is difficult to tell where sea and sky meet and merge, as minute golden figures on surfboards float among the waves as if reaching for the sky itself. As with a number of the paintings here, Rick replaces here past preference for blues with pinks, ethereal, hot, or paling like cotton candy dissolving into mist. As peaceful and lush as each work here can be seen, beneath that is a vision that can only be considered emotionally transcendent. The exhibition’s final beautiful day at bG Gallery is November 4th.

Walk across Bergamot Station’s parking lot to Building Bridges Art Exchange to take in another series of ocean-centric images, but with an entirely different message and medium. Curated by Marisa Caichiolo, under the scientific auspices of Dr. Eric Larour, artists Guillermo Anselmo Vezzosi and Osceola Refetoff offer a stellar exhibition on climate change and global warming in their Summer Artists and Scientists Residency, Shifting Landscapes: Sea Level Rise in Los Angeles and Beyond.

Refetoff’s visionary photographic and projected video images compel and entrance. Producing his first video in over a decade as a large-scale projection, Sea of Change (edited with Juri Koll) offers intense and beautiful images that include drone footage from the near-North-Pole community of Svalbard, California’s Central Valley fracking operations, and images of the distressed Salton Sea, as well as NASA satellite images, and AI prompts based on Refetoff’s own infrared photographic images, projected to imagine future scenarios. The 8 minutes video is both entrancing and heartbreaking, as we contemplate the rising likelihood of planetary change. Refetoff also created his first sculpture, representing potential projected rise in sea level at Santa Monica Pier based on the future of human C02 emissions.

In the same exhibition, Vezzosi also shines with work that includes a mysteriously translucent series of some 165 transfer photographs on recycled plastic food containers in “Melted Memories,” with the photographic images collected from NASA Observatory, the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the Glacier Repeat photo project from the Glacier National Park Montana.
From his “Offerings to ask for forgiveness” series, a large wall work resembles glacial ice, and is also constructed from recycled plastic from food containers collected from trash. He relates that the “ice” is made to “ask for forgiveness for the traces of our civilization…forcing [nature] to arrive to the present.”  The exhibition closes November 4th.

While Rick’s beauty will soothe, Reftoff’s and Vezzosi’s will jolt. Both exhibitions are profoundly lovely and of this moment.

Bergamot Bonus: on Sunday November 5th, you may want to hurry back to the same Santa Monica location. bG is presenting an exclusive one-day exhibition, curated by artist A.M. Rousseau. Titled Small Pieces We’ve Collected Over the Years, the exhibition pays tribute to the passion for art shared by A.M. Rousseau and her late husband, Duvall Hecht and their support for both artists and the thriving Los Angeles art community. There are some 67 Los Angeles area artists represented in the show, including work by Rick.

Building Bridges is located at 2525 Michigan Ave. #F2 at Bergamot in Santa Monica; bG is located at #A2.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists and by Genie Davis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Landscapes of the Soul: Kinematic Exposures

Photographic artist Osceola Refetoff has created many landscapes over the years that I’ve followed his work. Some are a unique take on the desert, revealing abandoned dreams and empty highways. Others feature the wings of airplanes and lustrous cloud formations; rain on a windshield; or they reveal abstract visions of urban light and land. He’s shaped stunning infrared photographs, and raw, so-dusty-you-can-smell-it photojournalism images of broken houses and jagged rock. Most recently, Refetoff has shown seemingly magical pinhole camera images that include ephemeral captures of people, mysterious places, and evocative but unrecognizable locations.

Kinematic Exposures, now at the Von Lintel Gallery at the Bendix building, available for viewing both online and in-person by appointment through October 31st, captures a sublime dreamscape of handheld, pinhole-camera exposures, primarily featuring images from a recent trip he made to Antarctica.

The desolate nature and graceful, swooping beauty of the icy landscape spins the viewer into a somewhat otherworldly dimension. Joining these images are elongated, reminiscent of Giacometti and Modigliani, vividly colored exposures of people. The latter provide viewers with the embodiment of living beings who could have come from another planet just as easily as earth.

Refetoff  has described “Kinematic Pinhole Exposure™” as his own term for the images he creates “make while moving about with a pinhole camera.” The works reveal him to be not just a formidable documentarian of place and a conveyor of time and imagination, but as an artist plugged into the soul. The human soul, sure, but also seemingly that of the earth itself, and the sense of a greater being watching us with that slightly blurry but beautiful view from a pinhole camera.

He seems to dabble with turning reality into dream, and with the deeper experience of sensation and emotion as being an innate factor in creating any landscape.

In images such as “Shifting Seas,” the storm cloud of climate change and other human failings is perceived as anxiety, even within an otherwise peaceful, blue palette.

It is there again in the blur and rush of “Active Sound,” where the palette is less unified.

A fiery sun is all consuming in “Drifting Mesa,” an image that nonetheless offers a surreal memory-superimposition, at least for this viewer, of Big Bend National Park, and Monument Valley on an ice floe.

And his human forms in the “Persistence of Being” are both surreal future and mystical reimagining of our place on this planet.

Private viewings for Kinematic Exposures are schedule at 30 minute intervals; masks required. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. To schedule a visit, stop by http://vonlintel.com/

  • Genie Davis; images provided by artist

LAAA Gallery 825 Offers Lustrous Solo and Group Exhibitions

Group exhibition, Penumbra

With three fine solo shows and one group show, the Los Angeles Art Associations Gallery 825’s current exhibitions, which opened February 22nd, are each deeply rewarding.

Suzanne Pratt

Suzanne Pratt’s exhibit bird·song, which is profoundly meditative, focusing on the transitory yet eternal in the immediate moment. The precise but seeming infinite images weave a complexity rooted in a primal sense of life-force. Spirals, shell-like shapes, seemingly-petaled pieces such as the artist’s richly dimensional “niyamita,” compel a closer look at the world itself as filled with meaning. Dimensional and riveting.

L. Aviva Diamond

L. Aviva Diamond’s large-scale photography also offers a dazzle of meditative works – these riveting works depict water as an entire world – in her glowing Light Stream. Euphoric and filled with a swirling dance that pulls the viewer within them, these sensational abstract images transport the viewer to another world that is both mysterious and magical. 

Mark Indig

Photographer Mark Indig uses architectural shapes in his new body of photographic work, Naked Triangles. Skeletal and powerful, described as “x-rays of our culture,” radio towers and cell phone transmitters are depicted with grace, as stark, lovely, and spare, like castle turrets and church steeples for our time. Electric wires and their connection points stand like robotic sentinels, watchfully ominous. The delicacy of their construction reminds the viewer of the art of Watts Towers at first glance; a second look creates a less benign view, as if of a technological take-over.

Osceola Refetoff

And finally, the group show on exhibit, Penumbra, juried by stARTup Art Fair’s founder Ray Beldner, offers black and white as the palette in a variety of mediums. Participating artists include Larry Brownstein, Amy Fox, Donna Gough, Rob Grad, Gina Herrera, Susan Lasch Krevitt, Campbell Laird, Rich Lanet, Colleen Otcasek, Joy Ray, Osceola Refetoff, Melissa Reischman, Catherine Ruane, Seda Saar, Catherine Singer and Stephanie Sydney.

Catherine Ruane

From Catherine Ruane’s lushly nuanced nature in her graphite drawing “Magwitch” to Osceola Refetoff’s haunting infrared photographic sunset image of “Leaving Trona,” to Joy Ray’s mystical, textural wall sculpture, this is another rewarding powerhouse of a show.

Don’t miss!

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artists; exhibition photos from LAAA